Mushrooming health subsidies are creating sick incentives for government to push suicide

Speaker Mike Johnson this month blasted the United Kingdom’s brand-new assisted suicide law, which will allow doctors to help terminally ill patients end their lives.“Any society that rejects that truth about life as a gift from our creator and adopts a culture of death ..

.is in the process of crumbling,” Johnson (R-La.) warned.He’s right.

Alas, parts of America already welcome assisted suicide.Eight states and Washington, DC, permit medically assisted death for their own residents.Maryland considered an assisted suicide bill this year.Oregon and Vermont allow doctors to help patients from other states kill themselves.Roughly 8,700 Americans have died by assisted suicide since 1997, when Oregon became the first state to legalize it.The growing acceptance of assisted suicide is concerning.

When governments are responsible for the cost of their citizens’ health care, they have a perverse financial interest in their demise.Consider the history of assisted suicide in the Netherlands, which became the first country to legalize the policy in 2002.Medically assisted death is now mainstream there.More than 9,000 Dutch people died by assisted suicide last year — roughly 5% of national deaths; 33 couples agreed to die together. Some people who opt for medically assisted death aren’t terminal.Under Dutch law, patients experiencing “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement” — whether physical or emotional — can apply for assisted suicide. Consider a 29-year-old Dutch woman who died in May with a physician’s help: She had struggled for years with mental illness and been told her suffering would never improve, per the Free Press.Or take two healthy seniors who died together in June.

The husband had back problems; the wife had early dementia.They left behind a son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren.Similar stories abound in Canada, which legalized assisted suicide in 2016.Since then, nearly 45,000 Canadians have died using doctor-assiste...